When I wrote the first version of this section of this essay, in 1995, I closed it with:
One wants at the very least to be able to write about AIDS as Kurt Vonnegut wrote about the bombing of Dresden in Slaughterhouse-Five: “It begins like this: Listen,” and “It ends like this: Poo-tee-weet?” But we don’t have our befuddled anthropomorphized bird, confused by the things humans do. We don’t have the words “It ends.” Our bombs have not yet stopped falling.
As it turned out I was wrong about that too—at least according to Andrew Sullivan, who, in an essay entitled “When Plagues End,” which appeared in the Nov. 10, 1996 issue of the New York Times Magazine, proclaimed “the end of AIDS,” and dismissed with beneficent condescension those who “find it hard to accept that this ordeal as a whole may be over” (my intentionally cunty italics). For Sullivan, AIDS was—pardon me, had been—a gay plague, “a quintessentially homosexual experience,” and though he acknowledged that “the vast majority of HIV-positive people in the world, and a significant minority in America, will not have access to the expensive and effective new drug treatments,” their suffering was, as a whole, of a different order to that of the gay friends whose capsule biographies punctuate his essay. AIDS, Sullivan informed us, had been “a natural calamity, singling out a group of despised outsiders by virtue of a freak of nature” rather than a straightforward viral epidemic whose appearance in the gay community had been foreshadowed in the outbreaks of a plethora of STDs throughout the 1970s, and whose initial impact was magnified a thousandfold by the homophobically motivated disregard of the government, media, medical establishment, and general population. Of the pre-AIDS, pre–safe sex lifestyle that served, quite literally, as the breeding grounds for disease, Sullivan seemed only obliquely and then disparagingly conscious: “Responsibility,” he wrote, is not a word “one usually associated with homosexuality”:
Before AIDS, gay life—rightly or wrongly—was identified with freedom from responsibility, rather than with its opposite. Gay liberation was most commonly understood as liberation from the constraints of traditional norms, almost a dispensation that permitted homosexuals the absence of responsibility in return for an acquiescence in second-class citizenship. This was the Faustian bargain of the pre-AIDS closet: straights gave homosexuals a certain amount of freedom; in return, homosexuals gave away their self-respect.
“Freedom from responsibility” in a world in which one’s sexuality was illegal and one’s right to assemble and express oneself was routinely denied? “Liberation from the constraints of traditional norms” when exposure as a homosexual could mean the loss of one’s job, one’s home, one’s liberty, one’s life? “Homosexuals gave away their self-respect” because they found a way to have fun (and sex) in a manner that wasn’t sanctified by a revisionist interpretation of Judeo-Christian norms? Even in 1996, Sullivan’s version of gay history seemed based almost entirely on the “murderous representations of homosexuals unleashed and ‘legitimized’ by AIDS” that Leo Bersani had deplored nine years earlier—based not on the events of the previous fifteen years, but on the “stigma and the guilt and the fear” Sullivan told readers he felt about being gay, and the “shame” he felt at having contracted HIV. In sharp contrast to the writers Bersani accused of idealizing pre-AIDS gay life, Sullivan swung the opposite direction, demonizing it as a nonstop party that, in the wake of combination therapy, he saw being “repeated as farce” in the form of circuit parties and “as tragedy” in the form of sex clubs. Thus the reason that “many of us find it hard to accept that this ordeal as a whole may be over” was because “we may now be required to relent from our clenching against the future and remember—and give meaning to—the past.”
This analysis of the “psychological roots” of gay men’s response to the advent of combination therapy said in essence that the first fifteen years of the AIDS epidemic had no “meaning” other than what might retroactively be ascribed to it, and went on to tell readers that giving “meaning” to the past is merely a question of representing it with the future in mind—or rather a future, the one that Sullivan was attempting to conjure into being with his words. Here, then, was the right way to write about AIDS—not by bucking the trend of familiarization, but by accelerating it. Not by urging readers to work for the end of the epidemic, but by informing them that—thanks to their efforts!—it was already over. In Sullivan’s revision of the American plague, TAG is a group whose only quality is its “skepticism,” while ACT UP is nothing more than a “dark, memorable flash of activism” born of “decades of euphemism and self-loathing.” The “end of AIDS” had been initiated not by these AIDS activists but, rather, by America (and by “America” Sullivan clearly doesn’t mean its queer citizenry): “America might have responded the way many Latin American and Asian countries responded,” Sullivan wrote of the nation whose president didn’t mention the epidemic in public until Sept. 17, 1985, whose acting press secretary regularly chuckled when asked about AIDS, and whose executive branch, in 1987, banned HIV-positive people from entering its borders (which prohibition Sullivan lived in violation of until Barack Obama repealed it on October 30, 2009): “with almost complete silence and denial.” But perhaps the most startling thing about the “meaning” Sullivan ascribed to the (now vanquished) epidemic was the magnification of the gay plague in America—which by the time Sullivan wrote had already been revealed as a footnote to a global catastrophe—into the central fact of the epidemic, whereas the “vast majority of HIV-positive people in the world” were mere statistical phenomena, lives and deaths to whom was denied the redemptive, revisionist “meaning” with which Sullivan privileged his own experience.
In his 1994 review of Schindler’s List, J. Hoberman wrote: “Leave it to Steven Spielberg to make a feel-good movie entertainment about the ultimate feel-bad experience.” Sullivan achieves what I would have thought was a similarly impossible feat in “When Plagues End,” somehow making me resent the quote-privileged-unquote status of the western gay man with AIDS, and the ownership some gay men took of the epidemic—without which the “expensive and effective new drug treatments” that, eighteen years later, still remain out of reach for “the vast majority of HIV-positive people in the world, and a significant minority in America,” would likely not have existed until many years after they did. In 1990, in The Body and Its Dangers—the only book he lived to write—Allen Barnett surmised that the world would be divided into “HIVs” and “HIV-nots.” It turns out, however, that the camps are, as they’ve always been, the haves and have-nots: almost two decades after Sullivan made the case that the life of a gay American man (or gay Brit living in America) is worth more than the life of a straight African, or straight African-American for that matter, the western world seems to have acquiesced to his view of the situation. About which one more quote: “The record of humanity is a record of sorrows.” This is the hapless cuckold John Dowell in The Good Soldier, whose maxim is given in willful ignorance of another truism about history, namely, that it’s written by the victors, whose privilege it is to give “meaning” to the past—to, in the final analysis, decide when the past is indeed passed. If the bombs won’t stop falling, change the channel on the war.